Andrew Sullivan Extremely Excited That Barack Obama Has "Cunning" To Lie, Abandon Principle, and Ruthlessly Act in Own Best Interests

Barack Obama has been praised for merely talking. Why shouldn't he now be praised for simply acting like any other politician?

This isn't racism, mind you. It's just praising a black guy for managing to do what everyone else does. It's good racism.

Barack Obama abandoned his promise to limit his fundraising by accepting federal matching funds. As Allah and Dean Barnett both readily admit, it's hard to really castigate him much for doing what anyone in his situation would have done. He's raising more money than anyone else in the American -- and world -- political history; that's simply too much of an advantage to toss aside for "principle."

I put "principle" in quotes because I've never really understood why raising lots of money from lots of different people is itself such a horrible thing. It didn't bother me when Bush raised a lot of money, mostly from small donors, though of course the MSM attempted to portray this as something nefarious, equating Bush's quite legal fundraising with Al Gore's blatantly illegal fundraising from Chinese nuns in 1996.

And I put "principle" in quotes, too, because this was never actually Barack Obama's principle in the first place. His pledge, from the beginning, was an empty political gesture intended to benefit himself-- he thought he'd be at a big money disadvantage to Hillary Clinton, so he made a big promise about accepting federal matching funds because accepting matching funds would give him the most money possible, and he could claim it was some sort of virtue that he was taking in less money than Hillary.

He was attempting to cast hard reality -- a massive fundraising disadvantage -- as some sort of show of integrity. I could raise just as much money as Hillary, but I nobly choose not to.

Of course, as it turned out, he was taking in a lot more money than Hillary, so he quickly abandoned that promise. The very moment his initial assumption -- I'll raise less than Hillary, so let me position myself by claiming that raising more money is bad -- proved false, he abandoned that claim, and began talking up the virtues of raising lots of money from lots of donors.

And now, of course, knowing he can absolutely swamp John McCain with money-power, he abandons his pledge of taking matching funds in the general campaign, too, as expected.

In fact, he even managed to lie about that, quite gratuitously and clumsily, first claiming he'd tried to meet with McCain's people to negotiate how each would remain within the federal matching-funds limit, and only later conceding he'd completely made that up and refused to even entertain such a meeting from the get-go.

Barack Obama's decisions may be understandable. People acting in their own self-interest is always an understandable phenomenon. So, he lied and made promises and broke them, and feigned an interest in higher principle when all along he was merely interested in securing the maximum possible political advantage for himself. Par for the course in politics.

But if it's understandable that he lied, broke promises, and proclaimed false adherence to higher principles, surely it's not virtuous or praiseworthy that he did so.

Telling a useful lie in politics is usually understandable. We usually, however, do not praise a useful lie as a positive.

But that is, predictably, how Obama's various cultists are reacting to the lie.

They are actually praising Obama for making the amazing discovery that it is often helpful to lie, break promises, and act according to ruthlessly unprincipled self-interest. Surely no white politician would be "cunning" enough to realize this.

Scratch that -- surely no human being without divine parentage could possibly have the "cunning" to lie for personal gain.

It's truly extraordinary.

Next up, Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks will praise Obama for having the "moral courage" to work Chicago's corrupt political levers with gusto and take his dirty payoffs from Tony Rezko. Only He Who Was Prophesized could possibly take money from the Chosen Bagman. And then the Three Magi of the Chicago Machine descended upon The Savior's Rezko-subsidized estate, bearing him Gifts of Donations, Patronage, and Votes of Dead Men.

I feel like I'm watching Ghostbusters. "Surely no human being could stack books like this."

posted by Ace at 04:00 PM

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